


see you, space loser

by happycakeycake



Category: Monsta X (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Space, Ambiguous Relationships, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Astronauts, Developing Relationship, End of the World, Friendship/Love, Gen, Hurt and comfort, M/M, Scientific Liberties Taken, Suicidal Thoughts, Told in Snapshots, and what comes after, internal panic (in space!), losers (in space!), prose-y
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-12
Updated: 2019-05-12
Packaged: 2019-11-21 08:30:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,078
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18139835
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/happycakeycake/pseuds/happycakeycake
Summary: When Minhyuk calls out into the emptiness of space, it is incomprehensible that anyone would ever reply.“Are you there?”Somehow, from somewhere, a solitary voice reaches out to him with an answer.“I am.”





	see you, space loser

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dirtyretro](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dirtyretro/gifts).



> hey i know nothing technical about space physics so let’s assume this is very far in the future and there’s mumbo jumbo technology that we all just accept yep. Also rip oppy, the poor space rover was lost as i was writing this fic and it feels like a bout of bad coincidences - you will be missed, i hope you will see all the stars we can't.  
> thank u dirtyretro for this amazing prompt btw! got me more excited over plot planning than i had been for months and i really tried to let myself go (in a good way) when i was writing this!  
> just want to note that while the developing relationship is central to the story here, i've left it up to the reader as to whether they want to read it romantically or platonically - either way they're both losers in space :)  
> please enjoy  
> *for those who need the warning, please check endnotes - but be warned as it is a huge spoiler!

_0000_

On the steps of the station, he tilts back to gaze upon the beauty of his earth.

There’s been some kind of malfunction, a minor one, on the landing spoke, but he has the time to stop - and look.

The world is quiet here.

He turns on a track through his transmission radio, and the sound of guitar riffs fills his helmet.

He can feel them, vibrations through the vacuum, a fuzzy backtrack to the silence. Through the hum of low panic, it’s a comforting static.  

When the earth explodes - it is quiet. Completely. The universe sits back with a blink and a sigh, and he turns to finally see his world tear itself apart in slow motion.

The pieces scatter and it’s strange how it all falls apart.

Strange nebulae, stars crowned upon frightening clouds, suns revolving like moons, shadows cast by sleeping titans, and this is the last thing left for him to see.

It’s in the way they spread into space, like a dance, an errant waltz spinning across the marble floor and right over the gilded edge.

In front of him, into the dark pockets of the universe, the pieces scatter at random. His hands move and he finds himself grasping for each jagged shard but -

the silence roars, emptiness within his mind, and the rough guitar plays on.

_0001_

“-This is LM-4127 connecting to Operator.

Please - are you there?”

...

An irritated crackle followed by one final, dissonant squeal, and the transmission line goes dead.

Lee Minhyuk steadies himself with a single shaking breath and then proceeds to crack his head open against the communications panel.

Through the throbbing haze, he drags himself over to a docking bed and passes out.

_0002_

_This has to be a bad dream_ , is the first thing he registers as he blinks through the stickiness smeared over his eyes.

The time. 2:00. Two days after—the incident.

God, the _explosion_. He groans, and his entire body echoes the sentiment tenfold.

When he moves, he sees actual stars. The sun and the glare of Sirius coming right through the window. Daylight now and forever more.

He shifts against the bed, loosening the locked straps to free himself. When he moves it is with a purposeful crawl, grasping gingerly at nothing through the empty air. He thumps against the walls, a swollen turtle making its way out of its shell.

With his bruised head pressed into the observatory, he finds the empty space where earth used to be.

Now, only dust and debris made from the bodies of newly-birthed meteorites cascade into black.

Minhyuk smashes his frozen, hurting cheek even further against the window plane, until he’s sure of it. There’s nothing left.

So he crawls back, slower with his broken skull cradled between both palms, and sleeps. He sleeps until he forgets how long it’s been since he was last awake.

Then, he takes another look outside the window and passes out again. 

_0005_

He realizes this in the odd moments between waking, sleeping, and dreaming of nothing but grey skies. He hopes that he may not be really awake after all.

In a few days, the nearest piece-of-earth-turned-meteorite will come crashing through and knock his little space station off into free float.

And then Minhyuk will eventually be gone too.

Just like before, time slows. He knows, objectively, that he’s simply losing track of it and that, compared to the scale of the universe, everything is so small in the relative.

But the fact of it is this - he should have been dead days ago.

This keeps him strapped to the bed, eyes opened to the darkness as the noise of the universe frames his dreams, fills the space of his reality.

He swallows down the filtered air and wraps his arms around himself in the semblance of an embrace.

Sleep comes and goes, but in the black shadows of passing meteorites, he can’t tell the difference anyway.

_000 ~~x~~_

The space station was made to maintain itself for generations to come. A self-regulating, self-operated apparatus, fitted with solar panels, internal greenhouses, and a filtration system that recycled the water from his own waste to boot. Structure and function correlated at all levels of organization - it was designed to last.

Minhyuk, however, was not. And the same goes for the rest of earth, it seems.

Beyond all doubt, he breathes and wakes in time with the dry lights of the station anyway.

Unwittingly, he patches a makeshift bandage around his swollen left eye and takes his first sip of water. It’s sweet on the tongue, a taste of filtered sugar and the acrid burn of his own dried vomit. He chokes it down, gasping as his throat seizes, open and closed, with every gulp.

He forces himself to _breathe_ , one, two, three, just like the voice of his instructor in his ear warbling through the dense underwater simulations. He counts to twenty, before he downs the entire cup.

Minhyuk crushes it with a sharp crack and holds it there until his knuckles begin to shake, skin pulled too tight. One, two, three - he lets go and forces his hand flat against the table until it stops. 

It takes until one-hundred for the packaged food to go down his throat, and even then, it comes back up at one-hundred and fifty.

_“Breathe, Minhyuk. One, two-”_

He chokes on the pathetic sound lodged at the back of his own throat.

Minhyuk tethers himself to the floor and shudders, in, out - in, out, until then, there is nothing. He counts until he can't feel his cheeks, and then he trains his eyes on the blazing darkness at the edge of the horizon, where the light can never quite reach. It sears into him and somehow the emptiness feels complete. 

_00 ~~xx~~_

The station is not a station in the strictest sense. It can move and be directed on programmed courses like any other ship. In fact, for the majority of the time, it is jettisoning itself through space in stable free float.

In the face of a sea of meteorites, it doesn’t stand a chance. With its wide extended arms and heavy cross-pods, maneuvering is not a streamlined task. It’s more likely to tear itself apart rather than make any of the tight turns those young pilots had done, loop through loop in the bright blue sky with their loud obnoxious smiles.

Minhyuk finds himself watching through the window, hour by hour, minutes to seconds to inevitable sleep under the same dead expanse of space. Sometimes, when he wakes to a steady stream of light, he expects for a single moment to see a blue sky again. Night or day, it makes no difference, and he forgets those dreams long before he wakes.

This time, when the realization sets in, he sentences himself to the deepest of shadows.

The station is its own silent beast, and Minhyuk drifts, pulling himself, one hand in front of the other, until he’s tipped right over the edge of its belly.

Every station and ship has its own storage system. This one just happens to be a meter long drop into a dark pit muffled with dust and a few forgotten trinkets. 

In space, you don’t fall, but Minhyuk closes his eyes and imagines his eventual descent with his face smeared across the ground. A snap of high-impact sound seems to ring clear through the muffled silence, picking the cotton of his own thoughts.  

Instead, rung after rung, the curved pit cradles him with something close to a caress.

Minhyuk reaches the bottom with a small puff of breath, a light exhale of dust, and the universe is once again solid against his limp body.

Looking up from here, the light cuts a single watchful eye through shadow. He tries to raise an open palm, but lifting his arm makes him feel like he’s made out of pieces of discombobulated jelly. The image of him, green semi-solids leaking out through his sockets as the rest of his face falls apart into grey matter, makes his stomach growl.

He sits up immediately, and presses both hands, hard, over his stomach. The light from above is blurred, static, cotton, centuries-old dust, and he decides to wait just a little longer.

When he flops down again, it is with a strange flurry of motion that something solid falls into his hand. Whether it was the dust or the weightlessness of his own body, in the next turn of events, he finds himself tracing the rim of something smooth against his palm.

For the first time, he moves his aching, bruising body with all its awkward angles, and centers the object within the eye of light.

_Huh._

_0 ~~xxx~~_

What he counts as next day comes, and finally, he drags himself into motion. There’s something to do at least in all this empty space. Begrudgingly, Minhyuk squashes the feeling of grateful hope as he slips over the edge into the beast’s belly.

The transmitter comes alive in a series of clicks and beeps. Cradled in his palms, it’s conical head rotates, left, right, before settling with its nose pointed quizzically at him.

In the space between, quiet with unsettled dust and the splattered violet-dye shadow, it’s oddly endearing. For a moment, Minhyuk considers naming it, but even that seems too soon in the aftermath of what’s happened.

Through the haphazard set-up of wires he’s dug out of the station’s discarded grave, he searches, station by station for a signal. The static changes with every skip, a whine or crackle and sometimes it even sounds like an angry voice shouting through the haze. Indecipherable languages, the vestigial remains of things ancient and inexplicable resting in the void between him and - somewhere.

Minhyuk has never felt more alone.

“Are you there?”

The transmitter makes an aborted hum and its disc spins once. Its little antenna remains pointed at him, where his words are, a blatant lie right on the tip of Pinocchio’s growing nose.

He doesn’t know who he was looking for, but the transmitter remains silent, rotating over and over with its occasional flashes of light.

Green, yellow, red. Red, red, red, and red long after he lays down and curls his fingers over his lids, over the pulsing beat of darkness.

A distortion of yellow in a series of uneven blinks. Then, _green_.

_~~xxxx~~ _

Minhyuk sleeps and wakes, stuffed shadows in his ears, dreaming of clouds that taste like dust in his mouth. He clenches his empty jaw, shifting his teeth this way and that until something tender gives way with an audible pop.

It is no surprise that by now, the number of days is completely lost on him.

Sun or moon, given a gentle sunset and bleeding sunrise, they don’t matter to him here. In the station’s belly, the world is simply a concept of empty space. Forgotten suits reclined over the strange outline of storage boxes, and a drowning hum that fills his head and becomes silence.

Sometimes, Minhyuk thinks he can hear voices whispered under his own.

The transmitter beeps idly. _Red, red, red._

He rolls into an upright position, pulling from the base of his spine up through the tense chord of his neck. There’s a feeling that persists, something tight locked up and squeezing within him. Like he’s left his glasses too long on the top of his head and the ridges have made permanent imprints in his skull. It’s stifling in a way that is distorted and spun out too painfully, time and time again. 

 _Red_. One beep. Minhyuk’s eyes roll toward the transmitter’s rotating head.

 _Yellow_. Three rapid notes that make him jump. Through the filtered shadow, the light flickers on and off, urgent.

It fluctuates wildly through spasms, a patient on the last dragging pulses of his heavy heart. Then - _green_. The head stops spinning and it’s pointed directly at him.

“Hello?”

Minhyuk’s dives for the wires, fumbling for the right ones until a signal flows with renewed pulse through his swollen fingers. He takes a deep breath - _one, two,_  steady - _breathe Minhyuk_ -

and then he replies.

“Hello - this,” _one, two_ “this is LM-4127 connecting to-” he has to pause and breathe, _three_ , choking as he waits for another voice on the receiving end.

The stranger reaches for him through a distorted crackle: “IM-8156.” The voice sounds rough, distressed with noise, urgent with fear. “I can see your station’s signal. I think - I’m close.”

Minhyuk keeps counting, one through ten, but he can’t hear anything through the roar of empty sound in his ears. “Should I,” he digs his nails into the trembling wires, “should I come out?”

“Yes.” An immediate response. “Debris 100 meters away approximately. If you don’t-” a sharp break interrupts them, cutting off the connection for just a moment. It sounds like an inhale of breath. The voice resumes with static stillness: “If you don’t, you’ll crash.”

There’s no time to wonder how he’ll keep up communications. Throwing the wires down, Minhyuk disentangles himself from the humming transmitter and goes flailing through space. An absurd glee takes over in the back of his mind - the image of himself striding uselessly through empty air in the last moments of his life, a disembodied voice that's somehow managed to find him in this stretch of the universe - he lets out an ugly cry and wipes away the wetness floating from his eyes.

He arrives at the top of the hatch, arms shaking as his legs give way into free float behind him. Pulling on the discarded space suit feels like suffering a life sentence for the second time, but Minhyuk grits his teeth and waits for the leaden weight to settle over his skin. Then, he slams on the visored helmet and rams open the hatch.

Tethered loosely in place, it’s the first time in an innumerable eternity since he’s been outside. Space stretches open before him and the only thing he can think about is throwing himself into that beautiful black expanse where he knows his earth used to be.

Instead, a hand stops him.

Minhyuk looks up and the same round helmet meets his gaze, nothing but slick black reflecting his own empty face. But those fingers reach, closing around his own, each one moving in its own time, and then he’s being pulled so softly, he’s floating up, flying free-  

They tumble into the airlock hatch with a moment of breathtaking impact, just as Minhyuk snaps free, just as he feels the impact of a rock the size of an entire world and the rush of engines tear his little space station apart.

Pushing the heaving stranger off of him, he scrambles to the port window. In the silence that falls, the drone of rough guitars starts up again and he watches the remaining pieces of outer shielding float away on a smooth wave of heat and energy.

Like this, with his head knocking a pulsing beat against his helmet, Minhyuk understands that there is no order to the universe other than bad luck and shitty, shitty coincidences.

. . .

When the other astronaut finally shakes off his helmet, Minhyuk stumbles from the window with loose legs and decks him across his long flat nose.

He hits him so hard they both go tumbling over the hatch’s edge, falling into the empty free-float of the interior corridors. Minhyuk registers, numbly, minuscule beads of red bobbing overhead.

“Dude-” the other man groans, arching back as he clutches at his nose, “ _what the fuck.”_

Minhyuk scrabbles for a wall as they both drift in pointless direction for a few moments of frozen time. “My station,” he stutters blankly, “you blew up my station.”

The stranger does the same, leaning heavily against the opposing wall with a tentative hold on his swollen face. “The leftover debris was on course to hit it within seconds.” He removes his hand, grimacing awkwardly. “But I’m sorry anyway.”

He watches Minhyuk with calm eyes even as bright red continues to seep across his top lip. His ruined face speaks of blue skies and marshmallow white clouds that stick like sympathetic parasites in your teeth.

Minhyuk doesn’t want his pity.

“I’m Im Changkyun.” He raises a stained hand between them, and a small dimple pulls at the left side of his bruised cheek.  

He smiles like a man who has no idea of just how much Minhyuk wants to deck him again.

Instead of tackling him straight out of the hatch, Minhyuk turns and shuffles down the empty corridor, pulling one hand after the next, resolute against the presence reaching for his hunched back.

. . .

The days pass again as they rotate aimlessly in place. The perpetual sun with its sharp flares breaking up the horizon, and Minhyuk feeling like he’s got his head stuck somewhere down the wrong rabbit hole. He still wakes in flashes, seared shapes beneath his eyelids, so oddly familiar at all the wrong times. When he sleeps, he does so with the awareness that there is someone else there, the reminder prickling at him like an entire leg gone numb.

In the presence of two people, space distorts itself into odd sensations.

So Minhyuk sleeps through his dreams, and Changkyun nurses a bruised nose as he tries to find his place among the stars.

. . .

Eventually, inevitably, Minhyuk learns it’s hard to ignore someone in their own space.

Even he has a sense of shame, and stealing into the supply storage rooms at odd hours when he’s sure he won’t run into the other astronaut is starting to wear on his last shred of dignity.

He should apologize.

He’s not going to.

But when he finally passes Changkyun again on another countless day, he purposefully stops and meets his eye.

There is a moment when the other man’s face goes slack in surprise, and then it lights up like the wind brushing open flower heads in a whispering meadow.  In that moment Minhyuk considers opening his mouth and asking him just how it felt to blow up his entire world without a second thought.

In that moment, Minhyuk wants to watch the sun set indefinitely.

Instead, he counts, each pulse matched to a slow breath, and nods. “Lee Minhyuk.”

He quickly pushes past the other astronaut before he can watch his expression expand into a blinding supernova.

At least now he can sneak food into his room without too much of a supposed guilty conscience. It’s an improvement in his book.

. . .

“You should work sometime,” Changkyun says without any further introduction as he steps onto a silent treadmill, one headphone dangled at his waist as he tucks the other into his ear.

Minhyuk scoffs and stares at an empty wall. It sounds like smoke squeezed out of him, dry and exhausted. “Work - work on what exactly?”

The gym space gleams with its interactive mirrors, and if Minhyuk looks long enough, his own face will simply fade into a blur of marble white, a superimposition of something distantly related to someone else.

Changkyun whistles and with one swipe of his finger, turns the dark holes where Minhyuk’s eyes should be into the clear expanse of space. His reflection glowers back at him, filled with the dim light of stars and bits of a world he could never salvage.

“Work on anything,” Changkyun states, starting the treadmill. He never looks at Minhyuk, training his eyes on some faraway sun and planet and dream turning on the horizon, but he keeps up a steady stream of suggestions with every step. “Work on maintenance for the exterior, the interior, testing samples in the lab, or-”

He finally turns to Minhyuk and grins with the shadow of a bruise still caught in the swell of his cheek. “You could work out with me.”

Minhyuk blinks and the words flit from his mouth, leaving behind paper-thin cuts he only notices after he’s said them aloud. “What are you, a dumbass?”

Changkyun’s expression flattens, and he resumes his running without a second glance at Minhyuk. The only sounds that follow are the muffled pounding of his shoes and quickened breaths. 

Somehow, it’s this - Changkyun in a stained t-shirt with sleeves that barely hide the crooked angle of his shoulders, heaving his skinny body against the treadmill like he’ll die if he doesn’t work himself into a useless sweat first - it’s this that throws the match into the kindling.

“How can you go on like this?” Minhyuk bites out. _This_ by the determined way Changkyun stares into practically nothing, _this_ by the not-nights and not-days he spends bustling around the station flickering lights on-and-off doing God knows what, _this_ by the sweat stains under his pits and the dissonant noise pumping from his open earphone.

For a moment, Minhyuk wonders, fuming, if Changkyun will just ignore him. Thinking about it makes him want to laugh and spit it right into his face.

Instead, Changkyun slows to walking in place. The noise stops, and he pauses to wipe his face against his shirt, rucking it over his hair in rough swipes. When he turns to Minhyuk, the front sticks up in a way not unlike the fuzz of newly-born chicks.

“I don’t know.” He meets Minhyuk’s eye. “I don’t know,” he reiterates, shaking his head lightly. “But it would be impossible not to try.”

He seems so steadfast, perpetual like the turn of the tides and the moon, but there are no oceans left for Minhyuk to dig his feet into, to feel the waves tug at him to go and sink into a wide world still beyond him. And without them, the moon is equally out of question.

So Minhyuk, lightheaded on the fumes of his own ashes, bites out a weak “fuck you” and leaves Changkyun to stand there with impossible stars in his eyes and his useless hope to be dashed into bits by some other cataclysmic collision.

In the end, he certainly doesn’t want anything to do with it.

. . .

Going out into space again feels like dragging a cat into a boiling bath. Dully, Minhyuk waves his gloved hands in front of him, breaking up the texture of the black haze. Being in the suit always results in a numb weightlessness, but he’s sure that this time he’ll literally melt and pour into the seams and holes like streams of half-dissolved plasma.

The radio line crackles: “Everything okay up there?”

Minhyuk’s breathing is growing short, but he tightens his grip on the tether and readjusts the helmet with a muffled cough. “Sure.” The line pulls further, and he drifts along with it. “Just - just hurry up.”

No reply this time, but the tether bounces with obvious movement so Minhyuk forces himself to count his breaths - _one, two, three_ , and _again_. There’s the sound of a flicker, some kind of distortion, but Minhyuk can’t make it out over the empty noise buzzing in his head, filling up his nose and throat like an exhale he can’t quite cough out.

Beneath it, the familiar riffs of a rough guitar begin to chip their rough edges into space.

“-hyuk, Minhyuk!”

The song falls flat, torn like a popped string from its fret, and Minhyuk startles with a choked breath. The end of the tether is gone from his hands.

He looks down, and there’s Changkyun, spread-eagled on his back as the line wavers in free-float between them. The other man flaps his arms, gesturing wildly, but he only spins further from the station’s lower edge.

For a few moments, Minhyuk doesn’t move. Space lasts as far as the eye can see, black until the flare of setting suns meets at the edge of an infinite horizon where the universe begins and ends. What would it be like to watch something disappear completely? From beginning to end, where it is and suddenly, when it’s isn't. Some part of him wants to open the line, let the static run clear, and tell Changkyun he’s the lucky one out of the two of them. Then, when there is no possibility to reply, he’ll untether himself and follow as a second white dot chasing the first.

Changkyun flails comically, a rotund bubble attempting to swim with no resistance, and Minhyuk watches as an odd feeling sinks down his throat. He kicks off from the station dome and finally grabs at the free tether. The rope weighs firmly in his hand, and he pulls and pulls until the solid feeling grows, until his knuckles ache and his teeth chatter against one another — until Changkyun shoots a hand out and drags himself to safety against Minhyuk’s shoulder with the bruising intent of never letting go again.

In the airlock, they unsuit with muffled breaths and the clunky shuffle of too many layers. Minhyuk does it all, each step at a time, but he’s only aware of any of it through the shaking panic blurring his vision. With the uniform half-draped around his waist, the gloves need to come off - but he can’t, he can’t pull his fingers free. 

 _“-y, hey breathe, just breathe okay_?”

Changkyun’s thin fingers are wrapping steadily around his swollen knuckles, and another hand is patting a soundless beat against his back. Slowly, unwittingly, Minhyuk follows with a shuddering drag.

They get the rest of the suit off, one slow agonizing piece after the other. Minhyuk is drenched in sweat by the end of it, blinking back the salt dripping from his eyes, but he can feel the air slick across his palm when Changkyun finally releases his hand. Minhyuk’s uncurls his fingers tenderly, each one bruised up to the knuckle. He didn’t realize he had been holding on so tightly.

Changkyun stands there for a moment, the two of them facing each other, and then he drops his head onto Minhyuk’s shoulder. “Okay?”

In his numbed state, Minhyuk can still feel the other man trembling against his own shaking frame. The both of them stand there, frozen as the rest of space moves on because neither of their legs will unlock for the next few minutes. The sound of their unsteady pants mingles in harsh dissonance until it dissolves into an even hum in his ears.

He finally rests his arms loosely around Changkyun’s waist. After so long, it’s strange to touch another person. He closes his eyes as Changkyun runs his hands, up and down, up and down, along his back. Breathe, _one, two, three._

“Okay.”

. . .

There’s a tap on the crook of Minhyuk’s back, and he glances up from the steps, away from the silent hum of the windows and the celestial emptiness of space outside - and there’s Changkyun with dirt smudged on his face, looking down at him as if nothing has changed.

He holds up a gloved hand, stained just the same with patches of wet earth. Over the ridges of his fingers, peeks a bright green nub.

Minhyuk stares mutely at the sprout, then up at him. Changkyun beams obnoxiously bright.

He runs the tip of his finger gingerly over the rounded head of one of the leaves, almost beckoning. “Wanna take a look at it in the lab?”

For the first time since they had collapsed together inside of the airlock, pressed against one another in a shaking heap, Minhyuk finds himself at Changkyun’s side again. It’s odd, to be close like this, enough for him to reach out and grab onto the tail end of Changkyun’s shirt.

Odd but it's growing familiar.

As they scrape a sample from the plant, Changkyun’s low voice swells between the empty walls.

“ _Helianthus annuus,_ sunflower. I’ve been incubating it in the most careful of conditions. It’s always a toss-up in space, under artificial lighting, but the last few days have done it some good. Look-”

Changkyun steps aside, the tiny sprout still cupped in his glove. The place where it was sampled glistens under the lights, a fresh sliver that he could almost smell - sharp and tangy sweet.

Minhyuk places his eye to the scope and there they are, the rows of little plant cells all pushed up against their cellulose walls, respiring, and in the motion of living.

The silence drapes over him like a blanket, heavy and sleepy at the nape of his neck. Minhyuk does nothing but stare. The way everything pulses, so green it sears into his pupils. He’s forgotten how bright the color could be in the stretch of flat darkness.

“It’s a new day.”

“What-” Minhyuk jerks himself away from oculars. The sight of Changkyun’s face under the stark lights makes him blink hard, enough to clear away the veinous outlines of green organelles imprinted into the air.

“We can start over - call it _Day 1_.” Changkyun bustles around to the side, settling the sprout in an open bed of damp soil. “My sunflower grew,” he says with a crooked smile. Somehow it seems as if that should explain everything. The sunflower bobs along, acknowledging the sentiment.

Minhyuk dull heart thuds inside his throat. “What’s the point.” He’s echoing the same empty sentiments over and over again, but he can’t dredge up anything else to prove his own broken point.

(Maybe, maybe he’s waiting for Changkyun to prove him wrong).

“We’ll work,” Changkyun grips the scope with sudden fervor. “We’ll work, eat, sleep, dream, sing, and live.” He looks at Minhyuk so suddenly, it’s startling, the promise his eyes hold. “And when we wake up, it’ll be you and me and a new day, and we can try everything all over again.”

He holds Minhyuk’s gaze for a minute before staring at his little sunflower again. The spot of green pushing out from a space where nothing had been before, where the possibility of something more could grow, grow and _flourish_.

Minhyuk hangs his head. “I suppose we could try.” Changkyun’s gloved fingers, wet and thick, wrap around his wrist, and it finally feels like a lifeline he can hold onto. He returns the grip, and this time it’s his turn to apologize.

Changkyun leads him out, hand-in-hand, humming a song in his rough voice that is warm water for Minhyuk’s wearied bones. It’s more than enough for the moment.

_Day 1_

Minhyuk wakes again with the salt of sleep harsh like dirt and grit upon his tongue. It’s like this more often than not, a tense series of blinks and the moment where his chest expands and is simultaneously crushed back into the vacuum.

More often than not, he finds himself at a window. Moonlight, cold stars, and the ruins of giants revolving around the spheres of other worlds. An empty sea that makes his fingertips go numb reaching for it. He presses his cheek flat against the table and stares into his own reflection in the darkness.

“Can’t sleep?”

Minhyuk ducks up, his face tingling with that strange sensation right on the edge of numbness. Changkyun leans against the doorway with his arms crossed, feet bare, smiling as if they’re sharing a secret.

He blinks and the moonlight seems to spill out between them. Changkyun pads across the floor, whispers over sand and silk, and he knocks their feet together under the table. His ankles become ivory against Minhyuk’s own flesh and bone.

Minhyuk stares down at him, and there’s only the unspeakable hollowness welling up in his throat again. Changkyun’s eyes are black and bright, flared with silver lashes that cut into his cheek, interrupting the shadows, the sharpened silence.  

“ _me too”_

In the perpetual quiet, Changkyun’s muffled whisper reaches past the tentative distance between them. He rests his head on his arms and stares out the window just as Minhyuk did, light reflected from the darkness with every slow blink.

They stay like this, ankles locked around one another from the cold, and as they watch the suns in the distance rise above the spheres, it finally comes time for their own new day.

 

They keep track of the days and nights by observing the positions of bodies revolving around the sun. There’s a lot of mathematical jargon, numbers strung along in growing tails after wayward decimal points that make it much more of a headache than any of the simulations with simple ratios that were supposed mean at least something in the end.

Still, it’s Minhyuk who gets to screw around with angles and hypothetical triangles, and when he finds that rough approximation it’s enough to tell Changkyun, who records it after the last scribbled hour always with that hint of laughter in his eye.

Every week (?) it’s a string odd of numbers that they sketch out a rough schedule to.

And so tonight, it comes time for an impromptu star-gazing session.

Changkyun calls it a “check-up” of the sky — Minhyuk reminds him it’s not so much a sky as the rest of the universe reaching from light years away. Changkyun breaks up the transmission line with a loud scoff and leans back so his feet float above his head.

(This time Minhyuk’s got his hand and eye firmly on the tether).

“So-” the line crackles to life through the perpetual hum, “what were you doing at the end of the world?”

Through the visor of his helmet, Minhyuk watches the glimmer of a faraway star. It pulses in and out of his vision, and he has to blink away the glistening shard caught in the corner of his eye.

Finally, he admits with a laugh that sounds like he’s choking: “I was listening to rock so loudly I didn’t notice until it had already ended.”

…

A sigh comes through moments later. “You know…I think I was sleeping at the time.”

Minhyuk really chokes on his own tears this time. Changkyun lets out a surreptitious cough that resonates with his own unsteady breathing. The stars seem to shine stark white against the darkness, and as silence falls again, they both know the other is watching the spontaneous bloom of light in a phosphorescent sea from the opposite side of the hatch.

“Idiot.”

“Hey - you mean idiots.”

“ _God_ , but we were so dumb.”

Changkyun clears his throat and looks back to where he knows Minhyuk is sitting. He can’t think of what he wants to say, but the conversation demands to make itself known through Minhyuk’s scratchy voice over the radio.

So he asks tentatively, because they’re on the subject and his heart can’t quite settle with the words jumping on the tip of his tongue: “What do you think happened?”

Minhyuk is blunt - he’d rather not know. “Does it matter?”

“I’d like to think it does.” Changkyun is an idealist, even after the end of the world. “At least we’ll be here to remember it.”

The two of them, one who had slept through the end of the world and the other too deafened to realize it had happened, with the weight of human history on their shoulders. Again, Minhyuk believes in only pure chance, but the universe’s heavy-handed die has not been kind.

“Think of it as our legacy.” For Changkyun, he’d like to believe that, make it into nothing more than an issue of simple acceptance and move on.

“The whole of human history behind us huh,” Minhyuk lets that sink in as he closes his eyes and floats. In this limbo, as the silence scatters like dust into his bones, as Changkyun’s deep hum becomes the steady voice of the radio, he feels the pressure lift from his shoulders, if only just enough for him to raise his head to the stars again.

 

Minhyuk finds that in the tentative emptiness - in the literal space keeping them light-years apart from any possible universe with life, and in the quiet distance that shortens intermittently between them - it becomes easier and easier for him to reach out with his own thoughts.

On the roof of the station again, with the stars as the sky across their faded helmets, Minhyuk asks about a previous life.

Changkyun’s blank visor shifts to glance at him and then he goes to recline against the rail with the sense of prolonged and purposeful stretch. “There’s a lot of things I miss. There was a park I’d pass every morning, every evening, and sometimes it’d be this perfect moment at sunset. The orange light would spill over the playground, and there’d be all these kids laughing on the swing sets and maybe in that instant, I’d pause just to bask in it all.”

Minhyuk pictures Changkyun on a swing, lanky legs stubbed against the ground from the awkward height. In his mind, the other man rocks back and forth in slow, aching motions, his back hunched and spine crooked, but his smile is as carefree as a child’s laughter.

“Where did you live?”

“I’m a big city guy,” he laughs, joyful static popping in Minhyuk’s ear. “No surprise there. Had rain constantly beating down on the roof, like little cats’ paws running across the apartment buildings. Every time I went outside my glasses would fog up and I’d have to walk through the streets half-blind.” He shakes his head and releases it all into space with a long stretch, a simple sigh. “Good times.”

The sea of white stars shifts in a blur across his helmet as he turns to Minhyuk: “What about you?”

Minhyuk opens his mouth, but there’s nothing there for a few moments or so. He thinks on it, on every instance of bitter regret, failure, and desperation in his life. Then, for whatever reason, he settles on something particularly tender. “My friend and I – we really liked music. In college, he would compose all these impromptu raps and sometimes I’d lend him backing vocals.” As an afterthought, he quickly adds, “Most of the time we were drunk off our asses though.”

“Oh-” Changkyun’s bobbing helmet pushes into the space next to his own, “you can sing?”

Minhyuk feigns apathy and shrugs, even though the idea of hearing his own voice to music has him shaking inside. “I was never really good at it.”

Changkyun waves his gloved hand, flicking the sentiment with one easy motion into the wide expanse of space. Immediately, the sound of a deep hum travels over the radio. The transmission line crackles and pops with every note, but it somehow adds to the quality of the song. It’s nothing like the rough guitar riffs that seem to tear into Minhyuk’s mind, but instead, it settles like a wave giving itself back over into the open body of the ocean.

Scratchy and tactile, a cotton coat that cups his ears with a muted roar - Minhyuk feels the vibrations of sound warm in the base of his own throat.

Changkyun’s wordless song eventually turns to a murmur of words, incomprehensible over the constant static, but Minhyuk sings as he did then, with drunken ease in his heart as everything else had softened into a blur. There is no noise from the rest of the world, but for the two of them and the intangible line between, it’s a slow farewell to the children frozen at sunset, empty swing sets, and drunken, forgotten love songs.

 

Lately, the hole where earth used to be has cleared up, filled in, and returned to the flawless curve of space before it. Every time Minhyuk looks he can still picture the bright glow of the atmosphere burning through the blackness like a single, perfect circle.

Today is another day in the line of many he’s long lost track of.

But Chankgyun has that handheld camera with him, and there’s that perpetual itch under his skin too, so Minhyuk shuffles into his heavy suit without another thought.

At the top of the station, he fiddles with a scraped panel as he watches Changkyun watch the floating bits of space circle where an entire planet used to be. He pulls absentmindedly and a bent corner comes off in his palm, immediately propelling itself into the freedom of beyond. Minhyuk lets it go so far, until he decides to finally follow after, at least long enough to slip down by Changkyun’s side.

“Hey,” Changkyun immediately launches into his hypotheticals: “Do you think all these remaining rock bodies could be drawn in by some remaining previous force that’s forcing them into orbit?” He raises the camera to his helmet, bumping the flat lens into the rounded visor as he scrolls through the pictures. “I’ve been taking down records in the previous weeks and it seems like there are bits every once in a while that almost stick together before dispersing again.”

Minhyuk in the past would’ve jumped onto the idea, clung to it and swallowed it down like the only pill he needed. Now, he simply shakes his head. “I don’t think I could go back again.”

Changkyun slowly lowers his camera and slumps over, if only slightly. “I mean – I don’t think it could happen either.” He perks up again, floating off of his seat, “But there’s nothing wrong with observing.”

“That’s not it - I,” Minhyuk has to pause, look down and sort through the thoughts that seem to be spilling over onto his gloved fingers. It’s not that he doesn’t want to think about it, but it’s what life is now – daily maintenance atop the roof with stillness singing in his ears, the greenery filling the lab, dirt on his hands, dirt on Changkyun’s own tucked against his palm.

“I’m glad you found me when you did.” He plays with his thick fingers, awkwardly tangling them together beneath their polysynthetic sausage casings. “I mean - I think I’m okay here, now.”

Changkyun looks at him, and Minhyuk sees his own blank helmeted head reflected back on the glistening surface. It’s an odd feeling, seeing this version of himself, the exact mirror image of Changkyun with nothing to indicate who is which.

“You know, my _Helianthus_ has finally grown out of its plate.” Minhyuk blinks, and the surreal quality of the universe fades, and then it’s just distinctly him and Changkyun, with their hands pulled into the easy space between them.

Changkyun drifts closer, pulled by the same tether, until their shoulders bump gently. “I’m going to have to clear it out soon, but I don’t want to think of it as an end.”

It’s true, Minhyuk’s been watching the little sprout slither so far it’s invading into the rest of the space dedicated to the other plants. There’s a habit for either one of them to check up on it, pull it back a little further, every day or night whenever it seems right. It’s obnoxious in its intrusive growth, but perhaps that’s why Minhyuk likes it so much. For its tenacity (it’s in space for god’s sake!), for an oddly fitting parallel to his own uncanny story.

“We don’t have to,” he decides, suddenly sure of it, of himself. “Make it into all those new beginnings you like to talk about.” Changkyun’s gloved fingers settle under his own, and the warmth unfurls from skin to skin in the cold sterility of space.

“Keep it,” he urges, nudging the other man hard enough that he tumbles slightly sideways into empty space.

Changkyun’s laughter explodes over the transmission line like an errant supernova. It startles, ricocheting through Minhyuk’s ears until it reverberates down into his body, over and over with lasting echoes, one after the other.

Changkyun rights himself and pulls Minhyuk straight to him. “Then take your share of it – it’s your fault for giving me such high hopes. Take some responsibility, Lee Minhyuk.” He laughs again, loud and obnoxious, and Minhyuk can feel it so distinctly, the honey slick on his tongue.

He’s got his life right here on the station, reaching under the stars, sleeping among the fallen titans, and there’s the last person left in the universe at his side. The smile tugging at his lips beneath his helmet is finally something he can no longer hide.

“Only if you clean out the storage tomorrow-”

Changkyun’s protests are drowned out by the sound of his own raucous laughter, and around them, the universe grows quiet in an infinitesimal peace.

 

Today, Minhyuk dangles from the hatch and proceeds to finish up the maintenance as he gazes into the same space he did so long ago from the same place atop the universe.

They’re planning a trip soon, so one last goodbye will have to suffice. Where the line of the black horizon melts into the blinding white-blue distance, that’s the furthest extent they intend to go – right over the edge of eternity.

He closes his eyes and hums an aimless tune, while his mind stills, calms. Changkyun shuttles in and out with green bunches flowering from his puffy arms, releasing each and every one of them with their names announced to the silence. The glowing leaves reach, suspended in golden animation, and eventually, the blackness swallows them all.

Unchanging as always, they face the lonely cavern of space and return to the station once more.

Perhaps it is the luck of fate, Minhyuk ponders again, as they finish the final preparations. There does not seem to be anything so definite as destiny, but to him, it wouldn’t be such a stretch to count on the alignment of the stars this time around. It’s so literal in fact, Changkyun would probably snort and make the same cheap joke days later under the fabric of a different sky.

(Earlier today, he had asked “Do you think we’ll find any aliens?” with that same crooked grin.

Of course, Minhyuk had said: “We’re the aliens here.” Changkyun laughed at the sardonic look on his face, loud enough to fill any and all of space).

He counts on it now like a constant, a calm that blankets the humming sound beneath the perpetual silence. 

Yet, constants and variables, they translate like poetry into the most mathematical sense. The notation of symbols to represent indescribable motions, they are events of pure chance that border almost on dramatic irony.

Thus — when the stray astral body slams into them, it is a collision without warning.

With the entire station screaming in shutdown, red lights flashing panic, Minhyuk can only watch Changkyun’s eyes widen across his face as the shadows flicker on and off, on and off in their black sockets. He can only watch as the constants and variables rearrange themselves accordingly, and wonder at how easy it is for everything to fall apart again.

Red creeps from his pores, black coats down his cheeks in wild streaks, and as everything continues to shatter, Changkyun jerks in strange angles beneath a collapsed interior wall. Minhyuk, finally, finally looks down at his palms and begins to make out the slick beneath the black.

If the silence before had been a simple hum, now it starts up as the odd pulse of some kind of music again. Minhyuk numbly allows the rhythm to pound through him, dragging his foot behind him towards Changkyun with every sharp note.

Somehow, the light flickers red, red, red, and he recognizes the signal in sequence, just like when they first met. Changkyun’s pallid cheek rolls in the cradle his arms, and the red on his skin makes it flash dark yellow, yellow, yellow, down to the bone.

Red — the spasms continue across his lids, so Minhyuk presses his face to Changkyun’s shuddering chest and waits for the final pulse of green.

The odd rhythm swells, clashing in cacophony with the violent light in what becomes discordant shrieking inside his mind. _One, two_ , Minhyuk reminds himself through stilted gasps, _three_ – and breathe.

Through the heavy sound of his panting and the unhinged swell of the panicked symphony, the silence falls like a rock down a stone well. And beneath the echoing ripples, he realizes he can hear it again.

Rough guitar riffs like a heavenly spear through the fabric of space, and his own despair sings so loud it blends like many frenzied voices in one. The red light flickers, beats, and it goes on, and on, and on.

Minhyuk covers his mouth, shuts his eyes, and buries himself into Changkyun without a second thought. The station groans and calls to him in an ungodly voice, foretelling of the sleeping titans waking in dissatisfaction, of fallen angels shedding their torn feathers only for them to slip right through his stained fingers

but heavy in Changkyun’s arms, the world stills, and melts into quiet—at long last.

**Author's Note:**

> thank u for reading! i know, vague ending and all but i hope it left u with the feeling of a conclusion. inspo taken from lemony snicket (the world is quiet here), a quote about mathematics symbols and poetry (can't remember the author), and the mv for [stuck in the sound - let's go](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52Gg9CqhbP8&feature=youtu.be). please hit me w any feedback and general comments, i'm always open!  
> *warning: major character deaths


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